The Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave in the Ardèche department of southeastern France is a cave that contains some of the best-preserved figurative cave paintings in the world. Discovered on December 18, 1994, it is considered one of the most significant prehistoric art sites and the UN’s cultural agency UNESCO granted it World Heritage status in June 2014.
About Chauvet Cave in brief
The Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave in the Ardèche department of southeastern France is a cave that contains some of the best-preserved figurative cave paintings in the world. Discovered on December 18, 1994, it is considered one of the most significant prehistoric art sites and the UN’s cultural agency UNESCO granted it World Heritage status on June 22, 2014. The cave was first explored by a group of three speleologists: Eliette Brunel-Deschamps, Christian Hillaire, and Jean-Marie Chauvet for whom it was named. In addition to the paintings and other human evidence, they also discovered fossilized remains, prints, and markings from a variety of animals, some of which are now extinct. A set of foot prints of a young child and a wolf or dog walking side by side was found in this cave. This information suggests the origin of the domestic dog could date to before the last ice age. Hundreds of animal paintings have been catalogued, depicting at least 13 different species, including some rarely or never found in other ice age paintings.
There are also paintings of rhinoceroses. Typical of most cave art, there are no paintings of complete human figures, although there is one partial Venus figure composed of what appears to be a vulva attached to an legs. Some students of prehistoric art and cultures believe there was a ritual, shamanic aspect to these paintings, or even a volcano, that was active at the time of the cave’s discovery. The soft, clay-like floor of the Cave retains the paw prints of cave bears along with large, rounded depressions that are believed to be the \”nests\” where the bears slept. Fossilized bones are abundant and include the skulls of cave lions, leopards, bears, and cave hyenas. A study published in 2016 using additional 88 radiocarbon dates showed two periods of habitation, one 37,000 to 33,500 years ago and the second from 31,000-28,000 years ago, with most of the black drawings dating to the earlier period.
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This page is based on the article Chauvet Cave published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 21, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
